Thoughts on my mortality

Let me take a minute to discuss our mortality, the meaning of life, and survivors guilt, inspired, if you will, by reaching one year post-cancer surgery. There are a few topics I want to work through. Publicly.

The first is the finality of life itself. It’s one thing when you experience friends passing away; it’s another to be suddenly confronted with your own mortality, especially when things are otherwise going really well for you.

The second is how meaningless death is. Whether you get to live or die is completely arbitrary, and for most people who pass away, it seems entirely outside of their control.

The third is the loss of feeling invincible. This may tie into the first two, I’m not sure, but I used to carry this sense of being invincible and then it got taken from me. Outside of my own control, I suddenly became dependent on medicine to the point where, if I don’t take it, I will die.

These three issues weigh on me more than I’d perhaps like to admit, or more than I’m even aware of. Though I’m not sure “admittance” is the right way to frame this. I have no problem facing these questions. What I’m unsure of is whether I’m properly processing them. When I apply moisturizer and see the scar, I’m reminded of my mortality. At night, when I take my medicine, I’m reminded again. It isn’t that pressing, but it’s a thought that’s there now that wasn’t there before. This is a change in my life I didn’t ask for. It was forced on me. At the same time, I’ve had friends pass away from cancer this past year, and that feeds back into the meaningless of death. Why did they die? Why did I get to live?

On the surface it’s arbitrary. You could try to construct reasons why it’s fair, but it doesn’t work like that. You can’t say person A was exposed to environmental factors and person B wasn’t, so it only makes sense that A would go first, because person A wasn’t exposing himself on purpose. I initially framed it as being unfair, but that would mean that there are also fair deaths. There are very few people deserving of death. So few, that for me it’s not worth discussing it here. All death is essentially meaningless. The only meaning I can ascribe to death, is appreciation of life, but with how arbitrary death seems, that also seems far fetched.

It sounds dramatic, but in a way, the Brian before the cancer and the Brian after are two different people. I don’t want it to be that way, but it is. To deny that would be foolish, willfully ignorant. So I’d like to think I’m mentally stronger now. It’s one more adversity I’ve faced and overcome. But it’s still an adversity, and it weighs on you. It exposes you to your mortality in a particular way. Not the way a car accident might; this feels different. And even with the best medicine of 2026, cancer and other serious diseases are, in many cases, still death sentences. We all have to go sometime, but that doesn’t mean I’m ready. There’s still so much I need to experience before setting off to the great beyond.

So how do you recover from this mentally? The physical part is surprisingly simple. You wake up, take your medicine, and every quarter you get your hormone levels tested and your neck ultrasound done. But all of this is baggage now. It’s part of my life story, something I have to do that I never had to do before.

It reminds me of having a sore throat. When you can’t swallow or eat, you realize how good life is when your throat doesn’t hurt, when you can eat whatever you want. But a week after the cold clears, you forget your throat ever hurt, until the next time. When you take medicine every morning or night and have checkups every quarter, this reality is harder to escape. It’s harder to escape the fact that your life will end, and that it could have ended prematurely. So is it sadness? No. Maybe it’s something more profound, perhaps an appreciation of life.

It’s also scary. I’ve always been something of a hypochondriac, so mortality has always been on my mind. Maybe I should have opened with that. I always wondered what it would be like to have cancer, to have something growing in you uncontrollably that, without medical intervention, would end your life. And then it happened to me, and it turned out to be less dramatic than I’d imagined.

Though in a strange way, and this will sound odd, because it was thyroid cancer, the recovery felt harder than simply living with it. This is why, online and from doctors, you hear that if you’re going to get a cancer, thyroid cancer is one of the “better” ones to have, which I still find offensive, because no cancer is good to have. I remember getting my discharge papers after the ICU, which included the diagnosis: TI-RADS 5. I remember thinking, “Fuck.”

So I’m not sure where that leaves me. I keep rambling. But in a certain way it is meaningless, or rather, it made me aware of how meaningless death really is. It made me aware of my mortality in a profound way. It’s not my confidence that’s been affected, but maybe in some way it has, through becoming dependent on a medicine.

Maybe the mortality and the loss of invincibility form one group. But it doesn’t feel that way to me. It feels like three separate issues: the mortality, the loss of invincibility, and the awareness of how meaningless death is, all of it outside our control.